As anyone who has removed and tried to replace a cover plate for an electrical wall switch or outlet knows, the screws used are very small and tend to fall out of the aperture in the plate. This can occur during removal or installation of the plate. Sometimes the screw merely falls to the floor where it can be retrieved easily, although this does waste time. In other situations, sometimes the screw falls into an inaccessible area and thus another screw must be obtained, which wastes even more time. This problem is of course also encountered by the commercial construction electrician who, for example, is installing literally thousands of these cover plates in a new large office building. Complicating this problem is the widespread use of plastic cover plates of various different colors, such as ivory, brown, black and red, which have prepainted mounting screws to match the color of the plate. Thus, the installer cannot substitute just any extra screw if a color matched screw is lost and must waste additional time obtaining a substitute screw of the correct color.
Another problem associated with installing such cover plates is the difficulty of aligning the relatively small screw with the internally threaded bore provided on the switch or outlet assembly and inserting the screw into the front of the bore to make the necessary threaded connection. It is difficult to align the screw and find the threaded bore because the screw tends to pivot in the aperture in the cover plate. Of course, when there is a misalignment, the screw tends to fall out of the cover plate, especially since the screw and therefore the notch in the head is so small and easily slips from a screw driver used therewith.